live-8

(CC) Pikturewerk. Minor releases and bugfixes don’t generally make CDM news, but this is a special occasion. Ableton founder and CEO Gerhard Behles got everyone’s attention this week by making the rare public announcement that Ableton’s development team was temporarily halting work on new features to focus on fixing bugs. That has prompted some seriously impassioned discussion, on the Ableton forum but also here on CDM. Look past some of the hyperbola and name-calling, and you’ll see some insightful comments on both sides. In fact, the whole affair reveals a lot about how music software customers view bugs, updates, support, …

Killing bugs dead, as pictured in a sign in Ikaho, Japan. Photo: Rick Hall. New features are great, and yes, it’s often us users asking for them. But reliability and stability are more important to most of us. It’s therefore a welcome surprise to see Ableton’s CEO post the following message on Ableton’s forum today, announcing that the company will put new features on hold until some reliability issues are fixed. For developers other than Ableton, it should be telling to see how users respond — if this kind of frankness inspires confidence rather than concern, it could mean that …

Ableton is 10. Does that make anyone feel old? Live in action; photo: Marco Raaphorst. As the company turns 10, Ableton has introduced a set of discounts and giveaways, the most notable of which is a new entry-level edition of Live. Live Intro smooths out a lot of the wrinkles between different starter versions of Live, from LE to hardware bundles. At $99, “Intro” finally gets a logical feature set: Full ReWire support, both as host and client (or “Slave” and “Master,” if you want to be all kinky about it) Full MIDI support, including remote control, output, MIDI clock …

A monome-like grid controller built for Live, shipping in November for $199 – and I’ve got a first hands-on look with the hardware. The feature that makes Ableton Live Ableton Live has always been its Session View, an array of Lego-like blocks of music triggering samples and patterns. In the grand tradition of the MPC, mapping hardware controls that make music non-linear has been a major theme of computer music, leading to the monome and the Tenori-On. Usually, consumer gear has only combined these with traditional drum pads, knobs, or faders. Enter the Novation Launchpad. It’s $199. It’s a grid …

Photo (CC) Jay Vidheecharoen. The KORG nanoSERIES has a rabid following among many Ableton Live users, and with good reason. The nanoPAD and nanoKONTROL street for about US$60, provide basic knobs + faders + transport (KONTROL) and pads and X/Y control (PAD), plus a fully-featured, cross-platform editor, but still fit in a backpack. They’re small enough to use in coach on an airplane. Having to open Live templates, however, just to get the mappings you want is a big pain. So, instead I’ve created a basic set of MIDI Remote Scripts and Kontrol Editor templates for Mac and Windows, Live …

A handsome shot of the Korg nanoSERIES pad and controller makes them look pricier than they are. Photo (CC) Jay Vidheecharoen. When software has “Live” as its name, you know control will be everything. So it’s great that many control surfaces will behave intelligently out of the box with Ableton Live, including devices like the Akai APC40 and Novation ReMOTE SL. If you’ve used one of these products, you’ve no doubt been able to click a device rack in Live and have a blue hand icon appear in the title bar, automatically assigning, say, the first eight macro knobs in …

Still evaluating Live 8 – or want to learn more about how to use it? You can now read my review of Ableton Live 8 free on Keyboard Magazine’s site: Ableton Live 8 Review [Keyboard Magazine] See also (via comments) Nick Rothwell’s review for Sound on Sound June [subscription or US$1.49 fee required] Keyboard doesn’t yet have comments, so feel free to discuss – or disagree – here. I wanted to back up a little bit and consider Live as if for the first time. Now, I had also personally heard at least Robert Henke complain at one point that …

Mixed Up – Beat Blender and Mixmaster 1200 from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo. Ableton Live enthusiasts, you take very seriously what gear you plug into your laptop sets. We’ve seen painstakingly-created DIY controllers like the arcade button hardware below, and bizarre oddities like calculators and arcade cabinets and blenders and Osterizers (above). So, in celebration of New York installment of the Dubspot Ableton Live 8 Tour, Saturday, June 27, we’re going to get together in a fantastic space and have a little Live party. And we want to see what controllers you’ve made. If you’re coming to town for the …

If you’re using Ableton Live 8, you’ve hopefully already discovered the joys of Track Groups. Track grouping is a welcome feature in any DAW, but in Live, the mixer-centric Session View can easily get unruly with endless columns of vertical tracks. I wanted to share some discoveries about Track Groups, including what I thought was a big realization about how they worked with clips that turned out not to be as exciting as I thought. To group tracks, select multiple tracks first (click one, then shift-click the last one), right-click (ctrl-click on Mac), and choose Group Tracks. The result – …

With Live 8 in the hands of Ableton fans, two big questions remain for a lot of aficionados: first, how the heck do you deal with this new warp marker interface, and second, how can you make controller mappings for hardware more effective? Thanks to some enterprising, expert users, we’ve got video solutions to each of those problems. Warp: Engage The new Warp Mode in Live may actually be friendlier to new users; it’s existing users, accustomed to the previous way of working, who seem thrown for a loop. (Erm… excuse the pun.) I’m at a bit of a disadvantage …